How to increase disk read and write speed after installing new SSD (2009 Macbook Pro)? Why not as fast as advertised?

nataliemint wrote:

Drew, forgive me for being so computer-incompetent but how would I boot from another OS? And shouldn't I be checking the read speeds on my current OS (Yosemite) anyways because I want to know how the SSD is performing on the OS I use? And finally, what kind of resources would it be using that would be slowing down my SSD?

Sorry for all the questions - I'm not a Macbook wiz by any means!

You could make a clone of your internal OS onto an external disk. Hopefully you already have a backup of some form 🙂

A clone is a full copy, so you can boot from it. It makes a good backup as well as being useful to test things like this.

Carbon Copy Cloner will make one or you can use Disk Utility to 'restore' your OS from the internal disk to an external one.

Ideally the external disk is a fast disk with a fast 'interface' like Thunderbolt, Firewire 800 or USB3. USB2 can work, but it is slow & may effect the test.

You connect the clone, hold alt at startup & select the external disk in the 'boot manager'. When the Mac is finished booting run the speed tester.

Maybe this one…

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550

Test the internal & compare to the previous tests

A running OS will do the following on it's boot disk…

Write/ read cache files from running apps

Write/ read memory to disk if memory is running low

Index new files if content is changing or being updated

Copy files for backing up (Time Machine or any other scheduled tasks)

Networking can also trigger read/ write on the disk too.

You may not have much activity that effects a disk speed test, but you can't really be sure unless that disk is not being used for other tasks.

Disk testing is an art & science in itself, see this if you want to get an idea …

http://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-Storage.html

Simply knowing that it's about twice the speed would be enough to cheer me up 🙂

Be advised that 2009 MBPs have SATA II drive Interfaces, not SATA III. That may be the reason why you are not achieving your expected results.

You might contact Crucial technical support for additional assistance.

Ciao.

To get the most accurate speed tests too you need to boot from another OS, otherwise the OS may be using resources on that disk that effect how the test is run.

See this for a list of comparisons…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates

SATA2 looks like to maxes out at 300MB/s (theoretical max).

The odds are that the SSD you have is capable of SATA III speeds and is backwards compatible with SATA II devices. The speed inhibiting factor is not the SSD but the MBP. It simply cannot transmit data at SATA III speeds but only at SATA II speeds. You would need a newer MBP in order to achieve the maximum performance from the SSD (at least theoretically).

Ciao.

Drew Reece wrote:

To get the most accurate speed tests too you need to boot from another OS, otherwise the OS may be using resources on that disk that effect how the test is run.

I have thought about this and I asked my self this question: 'If I want to know the maximum speeds that the MBP is able to transmit internally, does it make any difference what applications are open?' I am inclined to say no. It would seem that one should open as many applications as possible in order to stress the system as much as possible to test for the maximum speed and it's limit.

If one wants to know the characteristics of a singe application or a specific set of conditions, then that may be a different matter.

Am I missing something?

Ciao.

OGELTHORPE wrote:

Drew Reece wrote:

To get the most accurate speed tests too you need to boot from another OS, otherwise the OS may be using resources on that disk that effect how the test is run.

I have thought about this and I asked my self this question: 'If I want to know the maximum speeds that the MBP is able to transmit internally, does it make any difference what applications are open?' I am inclined to say no. It would seem that one should open as many applications as possible in order to stress the system as much as possible to test for the maximum speed and it's limit.

If one wants to know the characteristics of a singe application or a specific set of conditions, then that may be a different matter.

Am I missing something?

Ciao.

How are you testing the disk speed? Are you just hammering on the OS & looking at Activity Monitor? Are you transferring & timing large files around to see how quick they copy etc? Are you running specific performance testing apps?

I can't remember where I read it, but running the OS externally to the testing disk allows you to see it without other apps probing the internal disk.

It's the reason apps like Final Cut, Photoshop & apps that use scratch disks prefer to use disks separate from the OS disk. It's probably less critical considering SSD have much lower seek & access times nowadays.

I can't see any mention of it in Blackmagic or Diglloydtools manuals. I can't recollect what other tools I used in the past.

http://diglloydtools.com/manual/disktester-guidelines.html <- it does mention disabling Spotlight & Time Machine.

Maybe it's a hangover on my part from testing spinning HD's which were so much slower, but I wouldn't use a test that had the OS running as the fastest baseline, at least not to complain & return a drive. I'd also erase the disk & test read + write speed across the entire structure, but that is something not many people care about. 🙂

nataliemint wrote:

Drew, forgive me for being so computer-incompetent but how would I boot from another OS? And shouldn't I be checking the read speeds on my current OS (Yosemite) anyways because I want to know how the SSD is performing on the OS I use?

Yes, how the drive performs in actual use matters, not in some test configuration, speaking of which, Sata2 maxes out at 300MB/s, but Sata uses 8/10 encoding so the actual speed is 20% lower, making for a theoretical max of 240MB/s, under ideal circumstances. Your speed is fine for the actual circumstances.

As Csound1 said earlier, your Mac should be fine for what you do.

There really isn't much reason to go into obsessive speed testing unless you need maximum performance to edit lots of video or massive images etc. That is unless you like looking at graphs & comparing numbers.

Good luck with it, Office should be zippy with it 🙂